M.J. Alexander

Artist Bio

My work is an ode to the land and its people, a celebration of the extraordinary in the everyday.

For more than two decades, I have chronicled faces and places of the Great Plains and American West, with an emphasis on my adopted home state of Oklahoma. Through reportage, photographs and poetry, my work embraces the sometimes timeless, often fleeting beauty found in the changing of the seasons, the cycles of life, the link between generations, and the vast and varied vistas of the state, its people and their stories.

My artistic practice has evolved from the medium of the printed page to gallery walls and museum exhibitions to immersive GPS-triggered sound installations of music and spoken word, live performance with theatrical multimedia projections, and pop-up street shows. I’ve written poetry to be sandblasted onto paths and lasered into sheets of steel, mounted to allow the sun to silhouette the words as traveling shadows and transform language and into spectacle, an idea made visible.

Through the fusion of text, technology, imagery and imagination, I continue to look for fresh ways to infuse art into life, and to celebrate the unexpected, the overlooked, and the authentic.

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M.J. Alexander's work has been published by The New York Times and Time magazine, featured in more than two dozen solo exhibitions, and installed as public art in more than a dozen parks and public spaces. She is a 2019 inductee into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, winner of an Oklahoma Book Award, and gold medal honoree in Regional Non-Fiction from the Independent Publishers Awards. The International Photography Hall of Fame describes her as “combining the vision of an artist with the skills of a storyteller."

Recent public art projects have been recognized by a Mid-American Arts Alliance Artistic Innovations Award and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Cherokee Nation, UNESCO, The Heritage Trust Collection, World Folklore Photographers Association, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Oklahoma State Capitol Collection, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, Canterbury Voices, Norman Arts Council, Urban Land Institute, Downtown OKC, and Oklahoma City Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs.

Artist Work

Title: Of Perpetual Solace
Category: Performing Arts
Genre: Music
Description: Lyricist/librettist/visual artist for 45-minute work for full orchestra, chorus and multimedia projection exploring grief, loss and love on the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Commissioned by Canterbury Voices; premiered in OKC's Civic Center Music Hall. Winner of 2020 OVAC Community Partnership Grant. Winner, Silver Medal, The American Prize.

Title: Path Poems
Category: Literary Arts
Genre: Poetry
Description: Author/project manager for "Path Poems" project, where my original verses were sandblasted into the sidewalks of eight OKC parks: Geraldine, Overholser, Pat Murphy, Woodrun, Dolphin Wharton, Melrose, South Rotary, and Britton. The 4-foot-by-6 foot steel stencils then were permanently installed as stand-alone sculptures, positioned to allow sunlight to flow through the metal to cast shadow words that travel with the path of the sun.

Title: Sound Trekking
Category: Visual Arts
Genre: Installation / Site Specific
Description: Attached is an illustrated guide to SOUND TREKKING: NORMAN, debuting in September 2023. This innovative community placemaking project leverages the power of art, nature, technology, and local history to create a portal to an immersive virtual sound world. A custom app opens an interactive portal that empowers every visitor to become a composer, encouraging the exploration of park pathways to trigger GPS-activated zones and create unique sequences of musical and spoken word soundscapes inspired by the land and its stories.

Location

 73103